And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive “No,” I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness.… The young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of fate had been cast into this forest village, was seized by a sensation of ennui, of loneliness.…
I remembered the Count's gardens with the exuberant vegetation of their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow, neglected avenues.… Those avenues protected from the sun by arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also know the women who sought my love and semi-darkness.… I remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the laziness so loved by young healthy animals.… There recurred to my mind my drunken audacity that knew no limits to its boundless satanic pride, and contempt of life. My large body wearied by sleep again longed for movement.…
“Tell him I'll come!”
The muzhik bowed and retired.
“If I'd known, I wouldn't have let that devil in!” Polycarp grumbled, quickly turning over the pages of his book in an objectless manner.
“Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,” I said. “Look sharp!”
“Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly.… I'm just going to rush off.… It would be all right to go on business, but he'll go to break the devil's horns!”
This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest arms I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous manner of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation.… When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas' terrible romance.… My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of terrible, strongly exciting novels with “celebrated personages,” poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed “nonsense.” I shall have again to recur to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count's estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake.… On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara. “If there could only be a storm!” I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.
The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the motionless giant. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the opposite distant banks. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.
The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of littoral mosquitoes, and far away on the lake, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.